Things have been going quite well for us. We’re feeling the thrill of our plugin taking off after more than a year of total dedication.
How do we assess that we’re doing so well? We’re in the top 30 highest rated and most popular plugins on the wordpress.org repository.
Every day there are over 1000 downloads of Wysija. More and more people are recommending us to their friends and colleagues.
Our plugin celebrates its first anniversary this month. What experience can we share with you?
Quite a few things, all shaped by 30 releases, 25 000 active users (guesstimate), 200 000 downloads and plenty of visits to WordCamps.
At the end of this post, I’ll also cover what to expect in the next 12 months.
Free and paying users have been waiting for a quality plugin for newsletters for a while. Both have different expectations.
WordPress users have come to expect lower quality from free plugins: complex user interfaces, little or no support, or relinquished code. It’s not a criticism. It’s rather the nature of a directory of free software, without understating the recent explosion of the Premium.
At the other end of the spectrum, are the customers of online email marketing services. Read More…
Ever wondered what someone thinks of your plugin the first time they try it? The four of us at Wysija sure do.
Our users give us positive feedback on how “easy it is“. The adoption rate of our plugin tells a similar tale.
Over half of Wysija’s 175 000 downloads use the latest versions. This is the story told in this piechart on our page on the WordPress plugins’ repository:
But what about the unhappy people who dropped Wysija after 5 minutes? Read More…
We have a new guy on our team starting this week. Welcome Marco, you just got yourself into a crazy project.
We picked him out of over 50 candidates for our first ever position. Why? He shares 4 core elements that we take at heart here at Wysija:
He seemed quite a natural fit. He looks quite serious judging by the picture, no? Marco is now in our About page and becomes the fourth full time staff at Wysija. Read More…
We’re ready to hire our first employee to help us with our support and some coding.
I’m currently “vacationing” on the coast of Brittany, France, for Easter.
The house where I’m lodging isn’t covered by the 3G network. But this little shack, above, in the back of the garden is. So I move in there during the day to work amongst the nails, the paint, and the gardening gear.
My usual setup is my large living room at home in Northern France. Being able to leave it at times is pretty awesome, even if there’s a downgrade in comfort.
This said, I thought I’d share how we work at Wysija. We’re highly mobile after all. Read More…
We asked our users to find a name for our mascot, the pigeon. 46 suggestions were submitted in 4 months. Thanks to all for participating.
It turns out the name we liked best was also the most voted: Maily.
We liked it because there’s “mail” in it, it sounds cute and it means something in Mandarin. More on that below.
It beat these popular suggestions :
The anonymous user who proposed the name is a guy called Luke, from Toronto, Canada Hampshire, UK.
Dude, whoever you are, you get a Premium license for your proposition. Get in touch! Read More…
Kim, Adrien, Ben and Jo at Madrid’s IceBar last weekend.
Wysija’s four partners are currently in Madrid, Spain, for a one week work meetup.
We rented a nice flat on AirBnB with a large terrace so we can BBQ. Find all the recipes at the bottom.
One of the partners, Ben, lives here with his Spanish girl. Adrien, Jonathan, and myself, Kim, decided to come down from France to pay him a visit.
We live in different cities. Our collaboration is thus completely digital. No Wysiplex in sight either.
There are human limits to our virtual office setup. Read More…
It’s fun to code useful things. It’s also fun to code completely useless things. Like a Konami code.
What is that? Essentially, you type a sequence on your keyboard on a certain page of a site or program, and something happens visually.
It’s really meant to be a geek wink or an Easter Egg, if you prefer. Konami video games have a special keyboard sequence. Instructions below.
The code was included in our plugin in the first version. No one actually found it (why would they?). So we’re coming out of our geek closet. Read More…
The four of us here at Wysija are celebrating our 10 000 downloads in just three months. Is this a good or bad number? We’d like to think it’s a pretty good start. We’ll tell you why in this post.
First, take a look at this screenshot taken from the stats page for Wysija Newsletters:
what you send is just awesome.
We're four guys who got tired of sending newsletters outside WordPress. Why can't we install, create and send pretty emails from WordPress? It should be fun too, not frustrating.
With this in mind, Maily, the pigeon, joined the team and we launched our plugin. Yay! Yeah, we know, Wysija is a silly name. It was a joke to start with. And it stuck. And here we are.
Made with & for WordPress.
We support the Standard Email Project.
This site helps Project Honey Pot.
